Children Easing Parent’s Alzheimers

This is an excellent article. My mother has dementia and and her mother suffered from dementia. Often dementia is undiagnosed Alzheimers. With 70 million Baby Boomers entering into early elderly population the United States needs to take a comprehensive approach to this devastating disease and ramp up its support for adults with Alzheimers.

South Korea is at the forefront of a worldwide eruption of dementia, from about 30 million estimated cases now to an estimated 100 million in 2050. And while South Korea’s approach is unusually extensive, even in the United States, the National Alzheimer’s Project Act was introduced this year to establish a separate Alzheimer’s office to create “an integrated national plan to overcome Alzheimer’s.” Supporters of the bill, currently in committee, include Sandra Day O’Connor, whose late husband had Alzheimer’s.

“Even though they are smiling for us, every day, 24 hours, is difficult for them,” Jeong Jae-hee, 12, said she learned. “They lose their memory and go back to childhood.”

It is part of a remarkable South Korean campaign to cope with an exploding problem: Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. As one of the world’s fastest-aging countries, with nearly 9 percent of its population over 65 already afflicted, South Korea has opened a “War on Dementia,” spending money and shining floodlights on a disease that is, here as in many places, riddled with shame and fear.

South Korea is training thousands of people, including children, as “dementia supporters,” to recognize symptoms and care for patients. The 11- to 13-year-olds, for instance, were in the government’s “Aging-Friendly Comprehensive Experience Hall” outside Seoul. Besides the aging simulation exercise, they viewed a PowerPoint presentation defining dementia and were trained, in the hall’s Dementia Experience Center, to perform hand massage in nursing homes.

“ ‘What did I do with my phone? It’s in the refrigerator,’ ” said one instructor, explaining memory loss. “Have you seen someone like that? They may go missing and die on the street.”

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